If I was 30 with $0, I'd build this - Mark Pincus (Farmville founder)

Transcript

You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI. Out loud, let's go through this framework. I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards. Awesome. Great. This is showing us nudes for My First Million. This is exactly what we like. So, all right, you've done everything. You built a $10 billion company. You're a seed investor in Facebook or early investor in Facebook. One thing you haven't done is sitting still. I'm looking at your biography and your timeline. It seems like you start a company, it either sells or fails. And six months later, you have a new company. And you've done that eight times, it feels. Do you ever sit still? I'm working on sitting still. My partner, Hillary, we said she's a tree and I'm a hummingbird. And so I'm trying to be more a redwood tree. Why is that? Why not just embrace your nature of being this extremely generative, creative guy? Who cares? Why be the tree? Be the bird? Well, I think it's good to have a balance. I'm not trying to sit still from a creative business work perspective. But in home life, I think it's good balance. I've added morning practice with breathing and meditation. So I definitely have extreme ADD. And I do better when I focus, but they both work really well together. My daughter, Carmen has dyslexia and ADD. And we tried Adderall and some of those things. And she liked it first. And then I was, wait, your brain is beautiful the way it is. I don't want to normalize your brain and standardize it. Let's figure out what works best for your brain. So I'm a little bit that way with myself. I call my investment and incubator work play ventures. Because I love this triangulation between work, play, and usefulness to the world. And that's why this book took so long and was difficult. Because it took me a long time to find the fun narrative and voice for the book. One of the cool parts is that you're very transparent about money. And that was pretty cool. I think you were in your late 20s or so when you sold Freeloader. I think you said you made $2 or $3 million. You sold it for $38 million. You walked away, I think, with three or five. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Five after taxes. Five after taxes. I had to pay short-term gains because it was so fast. It was a 10-month or something acquisition. Seven months, yeah. Which is crazy. And then you wrote a $38,000 check to Facebook. I think you said that would be worth $6 billion now. How often are you doing the math as to how much that would be worth had you not sold? Is that part of your morning meditation? You calculate what 9 million shares of Facebook is worth today? [SPEAKER_02] $6 million. It's amazing. I say in the book that it is so true in this life. [SPEAKER_02] Some of the patterns that I recognize is if you pick the right body of water, you don't have to pick the right boat. [SPEAKER_00] But if you pick the wrong body of water, the best boat isn't going to help you. [SPEAKER_00] And it's been so true. And the internet obviously was the right body of water. Now it's the whole thing. You can't even call it a body of water. And AI is that now. And there are so many instances where I sold something that I was early on and it became worth a lot. I mean, even in selling my first company, Freeloader, we said no to Yahoo. They had 35 employees. They'd been public six weeks. They were worth $800 million. We would have had 5% of the company. I would have had 1.5%. I remember all these numbers for sure. But I wrote on the back of an envelope, if I got fired in year one, which deal would be better if I got fired in year two? I knew I'd get fired. And so I was trying to figure out, well, at what point, how long would I have to make it before the Yahoo deal is better? And I thought I'd have to make it at least two to three years. And that seemed unlikely. So, but I was wrong. Even one year would have been amazing. And that check, was that 10, so that was 10% of your net worth you put into Facebook's seed round? Is that right? Is that math right? [SPEAKER_01] No, no, no, no. [SPEAKER_01] $38,000. [SPEAKER_01] Oh, $38,000. Sorry. I was thinking $500,000. No, there's nothing brilliant about my Facebook investment. [SPEAKER_01] And I get bugged when I see people on their investment resumes put that they were a seed investor or early investor. There were only three seed investors in Facebook. [SPEAKER_00] It was me, Reed, and Peter Thiel. [SPEAKER_00] But anyone listening to this would have made the same investment that I did if they could have. [SPEAKER_00] It's probably more impressive that I was in a place where Zuckerberg and Sean Parker walked into my office than that I decided to invest. So tell the story of how that happened because I feel the Peter Thiel gets a lot of recognition for that. And even Reed, I think, introduced or facilitated the meeting. I feel you're not included in that story as much. [SPEAKER_02] So as a historian of Silicon Valley, I want to know what was going on then. [SPEAKER_02] So can you take us back? [SPEAKER_02] How did that investment happen? [SPEAKER_02] What was going on? [SPEAKER_02] I think Sean Parker was your intern at one point. [SPEAKER_02] And he was a teenager. [SPEAKER_02] Sean has this amazing nose for viral consumer hits. [SPEAKER_02] And he found Freeloader really early and wrote me this whole long email and said he was a Unix programmer and he'd come work for free for the summer. [SPEAKER_00] And even Reed, I think, introduced or facilitated the meeting. [SPEAKER_00] I feel like you're not included in that story as much. So as a historian of Silicon Valley, I want to know what was going on then. So can you take us back? How did that investment happen? What was going on? I think Sean Parker was your intern at one point. And he was a teenager. [SPEAKER_02] Sean has this amazing nose for viral consumer hits. And he found Freeloader really early and wrote me this whole long email and said he was a Unix programmer and he'd come work for free for the summer. [SPEAKER_02] I think he was 16. And I said, sure. And he came and he was awesome. I don't know if he actually knew how to program Unix or not. I still haven't actually ever gone back and asked him, but he was a force even then. And then he started Napster with the other Sean Fanning and emailed me about Napster and just said, we turn on these couple servers, this music sharing, and every server is full. We need more money and we need a hundred thousand dollars. And I just mailed them a check for a hundred thousand. Because again, that was just a no brainer. You always send that check, but Napster could have been gigantic. And I think that was the beginning of the whole social media wave and revolution, but just a bunch of years, a few years earlier. Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through. They pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. And Reed and I had met while he was at PayPal around politics. And then we both came back to consumer internet in 2002. There's a small number of people. We both wrote the first checks into Friendster, which we just thought was a useful experiment. And then it started to blow up in February of 03, a month after it launched. And I guess it was in 04 that Sean walked Zuckerberg into my office at Tribe and said, you got to see this. I just joined this company. And I'd heard about Facebook. They were in a couple of schools. He said, we have a wait list for all the rest of the schools that want us to launch. But we launch a school. It sounded just like Napster. He's like, we launch a school. We get 80% the first week. The next week we get the other 20%. And Zuckerberg was just sitting here. He really looked like he was 15 or 16. I think he was 19. And he was in basketball shorts, Hawaiian flip-flops, had his feet up on my table and gave me a card that said, I'm CEO, bitch. And he was just from another world. He was just so unapologetic. And it just didn't matter because his metrics were amazing. Between 60% and 80% of his users logged on every day or stayed logged on. He had nailed trust. Every single person when I looked at their profile had their cell phone. And at the time it connected to their computer. They had this product called Wirehog, I think, that was like Napster that would upload every file and music and things from your computer. And I was failing so miserably with Tribe. Well, Tribe was also a social network product. Yeah, Tribe was before Facebook. It was one of the first three social networks. And I like to say that part of the deep, painful scars and learning that went into Zynga and went into this book, and I'm hoping to save other founders from doing, because it really is like a friend who's just in a bad relationship. And you're like, he's just not that into you. You could go back and shake me when I was doing Tribe and say, Mark, there's so much in this. Stop just sticking heroically to this one idea that's too complicated, got trust wrong, and it's not working. And there were probably 10 social networks that launched in that era, and eight were successful. Bebo was around that time. Michael Birch, he sold for a lot of money to AOL, as you know, Tagged, later MySpace. And I managed to fail with Tribe, because I just stuck to one idea when everything was working. And so by the time Zuckerberg and Sean walked to my office, I knew enough to invest. I should have copied them. I mean, I should have said, okay, they've nailed trust. I don't necessarily have to do the .edu, although it was brilliant, and I could have done it. But I think, like so many founders, I was stuck in this pride and didn't do what Peter Thiel would call that a moral arbitrage, right? That we don't feel good about that, right? But someone's going to copy it and did and will, and now that's, unapologetically part of Zuckerberg's playbook, and we see them coming out with their own calci or, and that's just the efficiency of the market. And the internet that somebody is going to do it. And it's actually how we get more innovation, because if they just exactly copied it, it will probably fail. But if they did proven better new, like I write about in the book, they might get to something that's an innovation. Hey, when a young guy like that does what he did, you know, he's got that audacious business card, he's got his feet on your desk or whatever. Are you turned off by that? You're like this cocky, arrogant prick, or are you like, I love this chutzpah? [SPEAKER_01] This is awesome. [SPEAKER_01] You're both. [SPEAKER_01] You're everything at once. And you have some deep self-loathing too. [SPEAKER_00] Because you're like, ugh. [SPEAKER_00] You know, remember, I was not a first time founder at this point. [SPEAKER_00] I had some swagger. My first two companies were very big successes. And now I'm on my third one. Are you turned off by that? You're like this cocky, arrogant prick, or are you like, I love this chutzpah. [SPEAKER_01] This is awesome. [SPEAKER_01] You're both. [SPEAKER_01] You're everything at once. [SPEAKER_01] And you have some deep self-loathing too. Because you're like, ugh. You know, remember, I was not a first time founder at this point. I had some swagger. My first two companies were very big successes. And now is on my third one. And it seems ordained, you know, and social networks working. And it's not mine isn't working. [SPEAKER_00] It was a sinking speedboat. [SPEAKER_00] We had huge virality, no retention or very limited retention. [SPEAKER_00] And you're like, he's got, he's holding, you know, if you're playing poker, he's holding the nuts. He's got the cards. So he can be arrogant, you know, and your front of brain, hopefully your executive function is working enough to overcome your ego and emotions and say, dude, you have to invest in this if you can, because he's got the winning hand and you've been playing this game enough to know this is the winning hand. What was the moment that you thought, oh, this guy's going to be generational? This isn't a short term viral app. This guy could be one of the greats. [SPEAKER_01] That came later. [SPEAKER_01] As he went, it went from just this fun kind of, he had lightning in a bottle, this rocket ship. [SPEAKER_01] He was having fun hiring all his friends and all living in a house together. I remember it was at the D conference, Kara Swisher's conference. He was there. Maybe it was the first time he was speaking. I can't remember. I don't know if it was the time that he kind of famously, I think it was later that he, yeah, I don't think this is SXSW. But I went up to his room with him for some reason. I was always trying to have impromptu product meetings with him. So I was in his room. I think he was going to speak. He had forgotten. I think that I had invested or that was part of it and said, oh, right. You own stock. What'd you put in? And he did the math. And I think maybe I owned half a percent of the company. And he was like, wow. He was like, that's amazing. He was like, that's going to be huge or something. You know, it was almost like in the third person, not saying it as Zuck, the founder, the CEO, but he was just like a friend and peer. And then he morphed like by the month and he had such a sense that this was destined to be this generational company. And I found he had that pretty, maybe it was around the time that he brought Cheryl in. But I think any time that we had issues, like we were getting in their way, by 2010, when they were trying to roll out credits and Zynga was starting to be a very big part of their platform, we were 80% of the ecosystem, app ecosystem. We were this really overgrown teenager. And they were trying to explain why we needed to voluntarily sign up for their credits because everyone would follow. And it was like, he wasn't explaining it in just business terms. He was explaining it more in a way that was like mafia terms. No, not even, there's a little mafia. And when they said, they said, you're not leaning in, and I started, they had language that everyone repeated in the company. And I started to hear lean in at the time as, so they wanted Zynga to voluntarily lean in for credits, even though credits wasn't just a 30% tax on our revenues. It was so primitive the way they built it, that we were losing 50% of transactions. And it would have been elective surgery to chop off our legs if none of the other developers in the ecosystem were doing it. But they said, he said, Cheryl worked in the treasury department and she can explain to you why this makes so much sense economically for our ecosystem. But my point is the way that he was talking about things was like, don't you get that this is in the way of the destiny and the fate of this company. [SPEAKER_00] So you can't stand in the way because this is fate. [SPEAKER_00] You're in the way of fate. [SPEAKER_00] It sounds like, have you ever read about conquerors? [SPEAKER_00] Have you ever read about Napoleon or any of these folks? [SPEAKER_00] Napoleon has this quote, or I'm paraphrasing, where someone was like, what's your heritage? They want to know where he came from. He's like, oh, I come from the people who conquer worlds. Most people say Irish or whatever. And he was like, I come from the winner side. Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] What you're describing is very similar where it was a sense of destiny. [SPEAKER_01] And that's very rare and intoxicating. [SPEAKER_01] It's an interesting question that's not related only to Zuck, right? [SPEAKER_01] I think one of the cool things that you've been in the game for so long and you've been early into a bunch of the right, what'd you call it? The right oceans or whatever. [SPEAKER_02] Bodies of water. But I wonder, can you pattern match now when somebody has that extra gear or that X factor or whatever it is? Or do you think it was a lot more of luck and there was a thousand other people just like them that just didn't happen to catch a winning train ride? What's your conclusion? [SPEAKER_02] I talk about this in the book that there's pattern matching around lightning in a bottle and every metric and anecdote comes back to this. [SPEAKER_02] And the reason why we don't pattern match that is because we usually haven't seen it. And this is where B plus is the enemy of an A. If you have to ask somebody, do you think this is lightning in a bottle, it ain't lightning in a bottle. You know, when you've got it, you don't have to ask anybody. It's like true love. I mean, I hope you all have experienced that kind of love that you didn't have to ask anybody else. What's your conclusion? [SPEAKER_02] I talk about this in the book that there's pattern matching around lightning in a bottle and it's every metric and anecdote comes back to this. And then there's the reason why we don't pattern match that is because we usually haven't seen it. And this is where B plus the enemy of an A, if you have to ask somebody, do you think this is lightning in a bottle? It ain't lightning in a bottle. When you've got it, you don't have to ask anybody. It's like true love. I hope you guys have experienced that kind of love that you didn't have to ask anybody else. If they thought this was the one. And there's so many things. Napster didn't have to ask anyone. Friendster didn't have to ask. Friendster was like, I thought it was the most unlikely thing when we funded it. But then I was sitting at a blackjack table at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas. And there were these two girls from there, maybe post college from Ohio, sitting next to me as one finds themselves in Vegas, and one turns to the other and said, "Oh, can you friendster me?" Or there's a month after it launched. She said, "Can you invite me to Friendster?" It was invite only. And my head spun around. I was like, what did you just say friendster? That's the kind of shocking moments. So it can be one anecdote like that. I mean, the first time I played Restaurant City, which was for our competitor Playfish, I was like, holy, I was so addicted to that game. I just tweeted back and forth with a guy who was the product manager on it. Just huge respect. I mean, I was so addicted to the game. I just think there are patterns that you can just see in their metrics. Like every time you see 60% DAU to MAU, just invest. That was Facebook. That was Friendster. When 60% of the people who tried this come back every day, then you get that kind of engagement. That's just lightning in a bottle. People can try to be a derivative fake of that. And that might work for a little while, but there's things like, I've invested in the last few rounds in this private company that has the biggest online bank in Europe called Revolut. I've never met the founder. I'm deeply in admiration of him. But I started admiring him from afar just because I saw every six months they do another round and beat the projections they'd given us six months earlier. That's what we were doing at Zynga. And when you see that, you also just invest without asking what the price is. This is not investment advice. I'm sorry. This is what I've done. When I see a company that's just beating its own numbers, and yes, in the public markets, there used to be Cisco trying to manage us with very carefully managed beat and raise. That pattern we've recognized is not real. But when it's real, and you're like, they give you numbers that sound like hockey stick, and then they beat those, just invest. Who else have you seen that with? It's pretty cool to hear that. So Revolut, which we don't use. It's European. Obviously now, Anthropic. Yes, Anthropic. They've got that right now. Anthropic. I did the same. I stupidly skipped the first two rounds. I wouldn't say it's even that stupid. I skipped the 5 billion valuation and the 18. And it was because at the time, nobody believed there was going to be room for a second LLM. And I worried they wouldn't be able to raise enough capital to compete. Then Amazon led that third round at 20 billion. And then it changed everything, because they had clear access to capital. Then the next round that I saw, I think was 180 billion. And I just invested. I was like, okay, I was wrong. I'm just going to invest. I'm not going to worry about the fact that I could have invested 10x ago. And how do you think about upside here? Like I invested, what was that for 800 billion or something crazy? And I'm almost laughing at myself like, oh, yeah, let me just, 800 billion. There's clear upside from here. But then you sort of have to break your brain and be like, if these work, how big are these going to be? How do you think about the case for how big these big AI companies are going to be? My pattern that I've learned in the last couple of gigantic platform shifts in the internet is that whatever we think we will underestimate how big and profound and impactful it's going to be. I don't think anyone even believed really 10 years ago that we would have multi-trillion dollar companies. I remember when all these companies were 300 billion. And that seemed like the cap. Microsoft, Facebook or Meta, Tencent, Alibaba. And I would have theoretically believed they could 10x, but I wouldn't have bet my money on it. Yeah, do you still struggle with that? We all know this pattern. For example, I like track and field and I always think, oh, this record is unbreakable. And obviously, every record gets broken. There's always a new freak. Same with companies, there's always a new freak. So even though I know that it's still shocking when you see it. And it's still like, I can't believe that. You just have to get comfortable with this emotional, intellectual dissonance and separation. Yeah, it's hard to grasp on the one hand, but then if this AI kind of centralized computing becomes part of the stack of the way everything gets done, it just makes sense that it'll 10x. So I believe these companies will get to at least 10 trillion. And that means they'll probably get to 20 or 30 trillion. And I'm not saying they won't crash before then, and there won't be despair. Who knows if in Q, a lot of people are betting that in Q1 of next year these infrastructure bets aren't going to re-up. But that's what they bet this year. And that's why the memory stocks have been on this wild ride. And it's exciting. Do you play the stock market? Do you just enjoy the game of investing, whether it's angel or stock market? Are you pretty active everywhere? Yeah, I am. I do enjoy it. And I am more active probably than I should be. Can you give us an understanding of what your portfolio looks like as a pie? Sure. I'd say 50% is probably in privates of some kind. Does that include the markup? That's probably with some markup. And then 50% is liquid. And I've been managing my liquid portfolio for about eight years. I got out of all the hedge funds and different kinds of funds. And I just decided that they were protecting me from some amount of volatility. And if I could withstand the volatility, I'd rather have control. It just wasn't obvious. I actually, I looked at the previous 10 years and I had averaged 2.2% annual returns on my whole liquid portfolio with wealth managers and funds and everything. So I massively underperformed the market. Thanks, thanks experts. Does that include the, is that the markup? That's probably with some markup, and then 50% is liquid. And I've been managing my liquid portfolio for about eight years. I got out of all the hedge funds and different kinds of funds. And I just decided that they were protecting me from some amount of volatility. And if I could withstand the volatility, I'd rather have control. And it just wasn't obvious. I actually looked in the previous 10 years, I had averaged 2.2% annual returns on my whole liquid portfolio. With wealth managers and funds and everything. So I massively underperformed the market. Thanks, thanks experts. Yeah. Thanks experts for keeping me safe and low. It was very consistent 2.2 though. They nailed that 2.2 every year, no volatility. And I just stopped any fixed income because I just believe that the governments of the world have no choice but to print money. And so I really like macro. I've connected with Peter Thiel on macro investing for 25 or 30 years. And so he's better than me, but similar. Can you explain what that means? I don't know. I only buy index funds. I don't know anything. Well, it's Peter Thiel has this talk on YouTube from like 20 years ago and he's describing Bitcoin before Bitcoin. And he's describing the macro problem of fiat currencies and printing and all this stuff. And if you understood that, then it's no surprise when something like Bitcoin shows up. Give us an example of some of your ideas. What were the big ideas that you got excited about? Whether they're right or wrong. Last year I found myself in late February almost fully invested in equities of my liquid portfolio. It was very bullish. I was very bullish on what Trump would be for tech and the economy. And then I started looking at how bad the dislocations were going to be from the tariffs. And I was thinking, okay, my read on Trump is he's somewhere between a good poker player and he's going to bluff. He's going to have some cards, but he's going to have to keep making his hands stronger. So if people don't come to the table right away, he's going to have to show them some cards and do some damage. So I was thinking, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And the markets are going to overreact. [SPEAKER_01] So I put most of my portfolio in gold. [SPEAKER_01] And then around April, when these deals started coming in, these tariff deals, the market wasn't coming back and giving much credit. [SPEAKER_01] I was thinking, okay, Trump is going to land this plane before the end of the year. [SPEAKER_01] And so then I moved hugely back into the market and it's the most volatility and change I've ever had, and this is not meant to be a brag because I've had bad years, but I was up 35% on my whole liquid portfolio last year because of these trades, because of gold and because of going in and out of the market. [SPEAKER_02] This year, not nearly as good. [SPEAKER_02] I've gotten crushed. I'm a huge long-term believer in Snapchat and I've been crushed. [SPEAKER_00] So this year I've been crushed in Snapchat, crushed in Bitcoin. [SPEAKER_00] Trading is stressful. [SPEAKER_00] Why are you even trading in the first place? [SPEAKER_00] Is it just because you love it? [SPEAKER_00] That's why I said I shouldn't be. I should be in some place where I set it and forget it. I enjoy it. And sometimes it feels like because there is no fund manager, there's some things I need to do just to be responsible. For instance, this AI infrastructure trade, I don't know whether all these hyperscalers are going to re-up in Q1 of next year or take a pause. And I love these companies and I love the trade almost too much because it looks generational that you could buy these companies at PEG ratios that are 0.3 or 0.25 where Nvidia, Micron, so many of these companies are trading. Their PE ratio is a fraction of their growth rate. That's called the PEG ratio. So on one hand that looks generational, but it's because the market is worried that the buying, the CapEx rate isn't going to keep up at this. And so I collared all of it just because I don't want to worry about it. [SPEAKER_02] But that made me be a day trader because I had to put all these collars on 10 or 15 different positions. [SPEAKER_02] But now I can set it and forget it because they're down 15 up 50 for the next year. [SPEAKER_02] Okay. I don't have to worry about it. [SPEAKER_02] One thing I really like just listening to you is that I appreciate that you are unabashedly willing to have fun. [SPEAKER_02] And as you said, blur the lines between work and play. I actually want to read you this. [SPEAKER_00] I think you'll appreciate this. [SPEAKER_00] I screenshotted this from Blake Mycoskie who started Toms Shoes. [SPEAKER_00] He put this on the wall of every office he's had. [SPEAKER_00] He said, a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. [SPEAKER_00] He hardly knows which is which. [SPEAKER_00] He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. [SPEAKER_01] To him, he always appears to be doing both. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I love that. [SPEAKER_01] I really do believe that there's a singularity of ideation and building, which is that we all will feel like Elon. [SPEAKER_01] That's why I started the book saying that we're so close to this future point where we'll all live like Elon and we'll just put our intention in the world and won't need to go through all the painful steps of raising venture capital and hiring lawyers and all the beat down of life. [SPEAKER_01] And we'll just turn our idea into something in days that other people are using. [SPEAKER_01] And in some ways we're there already. But I think at a business creation level, I think that's the very near future. [SPEAKER_00] And it's awesome. [SPEAKER_00] You have this cowboy gunslinger attitude that I love. [SPEAKER_00] I admire it. [SPEAKER_00] I would not say that's how I roll. [SPEAKER_00] And I'm envious of you. [SPEAKER_00] When I see a guy with great style and fashion, I appreciate it. Couldn't be more different, but I appreciate it. The way that you view life, it's not exactly how I do things. And I'm envious of you for it. [SPEAKER_01] But I think at a business creation level, I think that's the very near future. And it's awesome. You have this cowboy gunslinger attitude that I love. I admire it. I would not say that's how I roll. And I'm envious of you. When I see a guy with great style and fashion, I appreciate it. Couldn't be more different, but I appreciate it. [SPEAKER_00] The way that you view life, it's not exactly how I do things. [SPEAKER_00] And I'm envious of you for it. Are there downsides to this? You have this very stereotypical Silicon Valley energy that I love. [SPEAKER_02] Do you think that you feel stressed the same as the normal person? [SPEAKER_02] I don't think there is a constant state of Mark. I'm not like, I love, what's the name of the guy? [SPEAKER_00] The music guy who wrote the creativity book from Hollywood, Rick Rubin, Rick Rubin. I wish I was more like, I admire Rick Rubin, right? He's so Zen. [SPEAKER_01] I'm not at that level. And here's what's so weird, Sam. Maybe you guys can relate to this. And I guess it is funny to hear that I'm stereotypical Silicon Valley because I've spent so much of my career feeling like such an outsider to Silicon Valley culture. Only, okay, I know what that means now to be in the middle of the whole thing. I'll have to think about that. But this whole idea of work life balance relates to this because I find that when people say, how are you doing? Are you stressed or relaxed? I say I'm not stressed enough. I miss the level of intensity that I was in at Zynga. And because it was such a high to be in this creative loop that I could be working with amazing product teams and making these huge leaps every week and come up with ideas, get them out, see users love it, see metrics move, see our financials move weekly. And that's a high that I miss. And when I'm in the abyss, which is what I call anytime in between those, I have a different kind of stress and anxiety. It's not that my aura ring is happy. And the most stress that shows is around my family, my five kids. And I want my work stress to trump my family stress. And it's not. It's too calm. And I want to crowd out the time for investing or anything else. I want to be in the middle of this creative storm, and I'm not. And so that's where I feel antsy. It's like we were designed to get restless and that makes us go out and hunt. I definitely resonate with that. And when you had the Zynga thriller, in some ways you can always be chasing that feeling again, right? Because it's such an entrepreneurial thrill ride that you caught. You caught one of those waves and you were surfing it. And you may be out there paddling in the ocean for another decade. Yeah. You may never get another wave like that, but you want it. And you found yourself. And it's a bad addiction. In some ways my life would be so much easier if I didn't have that addiction because I could just go be a venture capitalist full-time or I don't know, a professor or something. Yeah. I want to ask you a different question. I want to brainstorm with you, actually. You're a creative guy and you talked about being in the right body of water. Right now, AI might be the right body of water. Maybe you have a different definition. Where do you see the opportunities? Where do you get excited? Where do you brainstorm with an entrepreneur right now about what sort of products to build? What sort of experiences to build? What sort of problems to go try to solve? Where do you think the moment is now for? I did a podcast with Gary Tan. And we started brainstorming about, can we close our eyes and imagine two years from now where the tokens that we use today are free? There might be an overall spend on tokens that is higher, but the per token spend per unit of intelligence is going to, what we look at today will probably be close to free. It'll be like water. And then I think we already passed the singularity or, you know, I don't know if I can say the singularity, but I'd say we already passed AGI, but the way it was defined. And so if you could have a human on call that was available 24/7 for anything you wanted. I think most of the time we would take that if they were available and knew the context. So I get back to that's why I showed the front of my iPhone in the book. I don't know if you can see it there. Yeah. And I said, this is what makes me so optimistic about the consumer future because. Well, your Nanit app was missing there in the book you had Nanit. Oh yeah. Well, now my, she's 18 months. I don't need the camera, but now they all sleep with me. So I don't even need the camera, but what I'd say is half of that screen is empty. And the other half of it is generic apps. And maybe we won't even have the screen. Right. So maybe I'm dating myself with that. This may not age well, but either way, we will still do the digital life stack of those functions. We'll still want to know about the weather. We're still going to want to look up your podcast calendar photos, whatever. And if there was a live human agent that was managing all that all the time, 24/7, I think we would use it if it was free. And I think freemium will come back because I think we would use it free. [SPEAKER_02] I do believe I'm an AI optimist. I also believe that jobs are going to skyrocket, not go away. And I think that we're going to be pulled into these services. [SPEAKER_00] We'll still want to know about the weather. [SPEAKER_00] We're still going to want to look up your podcast calendar photos, whatever. [SPEAKER_00] And if there was a live human agent that was managing all that all the time, 24 seven, I think we would use it if it was free. [SPEAKER_00] And I think freemium will come back because I think we would use it free. I do believe I'm an AI optimist. I also believe that jobs are going to skyrocket, not go away. And I think that we're going to be pulled into these services. And then we are going to want to get to a human sometimes, take travel. [SPEAKER_02] I think we could have an amazing travel agent, but when your flight was canceled and you're trying to get home from London and it's July 4th and you're racing to rebook the next flight, I think in that moment you'd probably pay 50 or a hundred dollars to have a human jump on, book it, get it right, trusted. [SPEAKER_02] Those are the zones that turn me on. [SPEAKER_02] And then the biggest thing I talk about in the book is this social cocktail party. I read he said it's about people, people, and people, and I'm with him. I think what we care about most across all these services is the social. And I think we're moving from consumptive to generative. I think the dopamine hit that we're going to get and we get already from being generative is so many times bigger than the dopamine we get from consumptive entertainment. [SPEAKER_00] And we feel bad about ourselves. [SPEAKER_00] I got off Instagram. [SPEAKER_00] It was a bad drug. It was giving me very little value. [SPEAKER_01] Now X is my thing and I love X, but now these reels, sometimes they do such a good job of looping into others. [SPEAKER_01] And my daughter will come in and be like, Dad, what are you doing? [SPEAKER_01] I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. [SPEAKER_02] I'm just watching Matthew McConaughey and he's awesome talking about July 4th. [SPEAKER_02] How can I not watch this? And then they're stringing me into somebody else, but it wasn't a good use of my time. And I don't feel good. [SPEAKER_01] I think that with AI, we are going to literally make music. [SPEAKER_01] I think that we are going to look at Midjourney, the magic of Midjourney. I could make you guys believe I'm a good home designer or logo designer just using Midjourney. It makes me more creative than I really am. So I like the proven better new bit from the book. I mean, that's one of the biggest pieces of the book. Can you close your eyes and put yourself in the position of a 25 or 30 year old, a young person, like Mark was when he started Facebook. You don't have a lot of money, but you have access to AI. Out loud, let's go through this framework of what you're going to do to figure out what you're going to work on in the next couple of weeks. I almost want to turn this to my whiteboards. Great, great, great, great. This is fantastic. Okay, this is showing us how to make my first million. This is exactly what we like. Okay. Whiteboard number one is what are we passionate about? Doesn't matter. Do not worry. Give zero concern about business or anything. I mean, I'm passionate about surfing, being a dad. I am passionate about cocktail parties, connecting people. We call this merging people together. I love connecting disparate people and they form interesting connections. I introduced two friends and they made the movie The Dissident. That turns me on. I just love to do that. So here's your passion board. Then we want to write, what is a real business? Let's not forget about real businesses. What is on the internet or what are industries, they might be mature, that are making a lot of money, you know, like, like, [SPEAKER_02] that guy who started the peptide company, okay, peptides, they're making a lot of money. [SPEAKER_02] But then you could put online dating, jobs, video games. It doesn't matter, just what are things that are addressable that are real businesses. [SPEAKER_02] And then on your third board, you Frankenstein these things and you say, well, okay, if I connected these boards, I don't know, being a dad plus jobs or dating, you're looking for the intersection of proven business with things you care about. We're not even at the proven better new part yet, which is you come up with any mashup idea that turns you on. [SPEAKER_00] And it could be like, you're into agents or you're into claw bot. I'll give you a real life example for me. I invested in Raya and I found them because I was single. They were 60% DAUs to MAUs. Raya is a dating app, Tinder but for high profile people. It's human curated online dating. You have to apply. It's like a really high end social club that has facilities like Soho House. It's curated. You have to have an Instagram account and they have committees in each market. Famous, hot, rich, cool people only. That's the reputation. [SPEAKER_02] It has grown beyond that. What it really is, is I like to say that online dating feels like a one out of 10 experience and Raya feels like a three out of 10. It's still not great. I don't want to diss it because I'm an investor. I think we're one of the biggest equity investors and I think Raya is amazing. [SPEAKER_00] But the difference from the one to the three is that I found with just using these online dating apps, there was the same odds of a second date if I went on the date or didn't go on the date. [SPEAKER_00] So it was like 0%. So I was like, why don't I just not go because I'm saving myself so much time and agony. And with Raya, it was not a waste of time. I had second dates and things. [SPEAKER_00] And it just wasn't curated enough. [SPEAKER_00] So the point is the insight from that is human curation. [SPEAKER_00] So then the mashup is, can we apply that same thing? And it's a lead business. You're paying for lead generation. [SPEAKER_00] But the difference from the one to the three is that I found with just using these online dating apps, there was the same odds of a second date if I went on the date or didn't go on the date. So it was like 0%. So I was like, why don't I just not go? Because I'm saving myself so much time and agony. And with Raya, it was not a waste of time. I had second dates and things. And it just wasn't curated enough. Okay. So the point is the insight from that is human curation. So then the mashup is, can we apply that same thing? And it's a lead business. You're paying for lead generation. Well, could we apply that to anything else? Could we apply that to—I had an idea to create a Lux BNB. Could we do human curated listings or what about human curated Uber? Could we have a high end Uber where the black cars actually are black? They're not just colored black. That's actually what you're talking about the other day with Jack's Diner. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I don't know if you market, have you ever heard of Jack's Dining Room? [SPEAKER_00] He's this Instagram kid who goes around the world. He's like, I'm at this place in Italy with the best gelato. And there's an amazing visual hook for Instagram where there's this crazy gelato thing that he's about to try. He tries it and he's trying to find the best foods of different genres in the best places around the world. And when I met him, I told him, I said, look, you're trying to cut these brand deals. Why don't you create the new Yelp? Yelp is this completely generic platform with everything. But if I trust you and I have trust as a service or curation as a service, human curation as a service, I would just go to New York and if I want the best ramen, I would trust Jack over Yelp. Great. So let's freeze frame on that. Okay. And now I'm like Professor Pincus. I created a class at Stanford around this, two classes, and the students still didn't do that great. So it tells me either my framework is not perfect or I'm not the best teacher. But let's freeze frame on that. Okay. So let's do proven better new on Yelp. So we say, okay, well, proven is—let's not change anything about the way that Yelp displays listings, rates listings. Let's do a legal copy of Yelp. We're not going to change it. We're going to freeze and isolate and assume that Yelp has taken the time over the years to make that what the world wants most. Okay. So we copy that pixel for pixel. I mean, we copy their onboarding of a new user, everything we copy it. Then we say, do we have anything that's better? Meaning 10 out of 10 users would say, yes, that's what I want, not Yelp. We probably don't have that. Okay. Better is actually really hard to get to. What we think is better is new. So we probably are just proven and then some new ideas. I think our new idea here is human curated and probably can we human curate it first and get to—can we take some slice, some verdict, some blade in a city? So we take, you know, Florence barbershops or, you know, Florence maybe better is like coffee shops in Florence. We're going to go do that ourselves and then put it side by side and test in some way and see whether people like ours better or not. There used to be tablet hotels, which was a better version, cooler design hotels. Is that better or not? This is the Brian Chesky way—do it by hand first. If people don't like it better, you do not pass go. There's no reason to even try to build this in software. If they do, then we can start to use AI and say, is there a way to use AI agents to automate this? But that's a very secondary thing. The first is, can we get to a clearly better product experience? That's the hard part. That's the lightning in the bottle, not the AI. And then what I would tell Mark at 23 or 25 to do is just force yourself to do everything in AI right now. Force yourself to code this, you know, I've tried vibe coding. I personally find co-work plus cloud code easier, or I get to more real things for myself, but force yourself to use it and see how far you can go creating agents as employees and other things. And then do some hiring—in addition, hire some really cheap people who could just do some of this stuff by hand. I would avoid founding a company around it. I would avoid hiring expensive engineers or people before I've connected all the dots. Hey, you have this interesting dichotomy about you, which is you seem like you're all about going big and building these huge viral things that get big fast. But at the same time in your book, I think you said one of the titles is like "Big" or something like "Scale." And you're like, it doesn't matter how many people you're going to get, you have to nail the product. And that's what you're talking about right now. But also, I know that you're big on goal setting. You have this—I forget what you call this. Do you call it a—I have it written down here? [SPEAKER_00] Book of life. Well, you have this cool thing of goal setting. So when you're ideating new companies, one of the things that kills ideas amongst successful entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs is asking, "Well, how big can this really get?" And that's always the challenge. People always ask that question. And you said earlier, and we all know this to be true, you never really know. And whatever things can get big oftentimes shock you. No one really knows entirely. So do you set goals early on? And how do you deal with that thing in your head or with entrepreneurs you work with, of this constant question of, "Well, how big can this get?" Yeah, it's so hard. And part of this book of life practice and part of this painful journey is killing our ego. Our ego is where the hope comes from that we fall in love with the idea, we fall in love with the potential of it. And that works against us. Because we've got to get to a very small use case that really works before we can do anything else. And I'm guilty of this too. We tend to skip it. And we get so excited about the bigger macro, the bigger idea, the bigger body of water. And we get so committed to this, and it's part of the danger of AI and vibe coding that we can build something in three months instead of a year or two. And so we do. And we skip testing it. And we don't set real objectives for ourselves, absolute objectives and goals that we hold ourselves accountable to. And the next thing you know, you're just in this B plus relationship. And you don't love it. And all these things are paradoxes. On the one hand, I start the book talking about this book of life practice that I've been doing since 1994, of really trying to have a conversation with yourself over time and writing in this book for one period of time every year about the same things, so that you can go back and And we get so committed to this, and it's part of the danger of AI and vibe coding that we can build something in three months instead of a year or two. And so we do. And we skip testing it. And we don't set real objectives for ourselves, like absolute objectives and goals that we hold ourselves accountable to. And the next thing you know, you're in this B plus relationship. And you don't love it. And all these things are paradoxes. On the one hand, I start the book talking about this book of life practice that I've been doing since 1994, of really trying to have a conversation with yourself over time and writing in this book, for one period of time every year about the same things, so that you can go back and see what were your hopes and dreams and have you done anything about them. And the real point that's come to me over all these years is not do you achieve these goals, but are you attuning to these goals? And are you in alignment? Are you living in alignment with your goals? That I found is more important to my well being and happiness than achieving. So if my goal for 20 years has been to launch dot earth and create my version of the metaverse, which is different than Zuck's version, okay, cool, it's okay I haven't done it. But have I gone for it? Or have I just talked about it? And that's I say these ideas and things haunt us. And over time, weigh on us because I've had this idea, but I haven't ever done it or I've always wished I could do this. And the point of the book of life is let's stop time. Let's stop time right now. I know. I went for it. And that's the point of the book of life. When did you start doing it? I started doing it in 1994. And I started the book off talking about how I had made a series of terrible career decisions. And I was being pushed out of this fledgling venture capital firm. And there was nowhere to go, it wasn't a next job. And so I'd messed up my resume. I had nothing to lose when I started a year later, started my first company. But in 1994, I went to temple. I hadn't been to temple for the Jewish high holidays, Jewish New Year's since I was a kid. Someone invited me, I was in DC. And I sat there, didn't understand what anyone was saying or doing. And I just wrote in a notebook about how shitty my life was. And all the hopes and dreams that I hadn't pursued. And the thing that I came back to, I hated most about myself, that represented just how little control I had over my life was that I smoked cigarettes. And as part of my book of life practice, what can we do this year that would make this a seminal year in our life? What could the three of us do that you would remember this year for the rest of your life? And thank you. Because so many of our years, I can tell you at age 60, that there are years I can't write anything down for. Most years are. It's sad to not have something seminal, not one thing that's memorable about that year. And so I was, okay, at least if I quit smoking, if I do a lifetime quit, I'll remember this year, and I think I'll be happy later that I did it. So I'm partnering with my future self. It's important enough, but it's easy and in my control. And for me, that was my path to changing my life. Are you still doing this? You said it's sad that you don't have a seminal year, you don't have this thing. And Sean and I both have young kids, you have young kids too. I don't know how old your oldest is, but you have at least one young kid. I'm in the phase now of my life where I feel a little bit treading water. And that's okay. I don't think that's sad. A kid being born is seminal, but I didn't achieve anything. It's not like I did that. No, it counts. But I'm enjoying it. Are you still achieving great stuff? And are you still a dog, even after you've had kids? [SPEAKER_01] Yes, but you also have to be realistic because now you've committed to be in service of raising these great humans. And that feels great, too. And I think the best thing I've ever done in life is be a dad. And I think the greatest achievement in my life is my five kids. So every year that I've had a kid, that's been the seminal thing that year. And to your first question, yes, you can still achieve. It's just different than some of your friends that made different decisions, and you've got to stop comparing. But you can—I built Zynga while raising Carmen, Georgia, Wyatt, my third kid. What was your schedule then to accommodate them, taking a company public while still trying to be—it sounds like you've mentioned being a father many times. It sounds like that's super important to you. How did you balance the schedule? [SPEAKER_00] If you treat the things in your life like these are non-movable rocks, everything else becomes the river that moves around it. And it turns out that it's great modeling for your company to show that you are prioritizing your family. And if you ever walked into Zynga, you saw kids and dogs everywhere. And so people loved it. We worked really hard, and we played hard, and we familied hard. [SPEAKER_01] And we integrated our kids and our pets. We brought them to work, or we brought work to home. So the way I did it, my friend and coach, Bing Gordon, he said the most important thing is they are there for the first and last 15 minutes of their day, and they're always going to remember that. [SPEAKER_02] And I made that my religion. I was never going to miss the first or last 15 minutes of their day. I'm never going to miss breakfast with them. Hopefully not dinner, but I'll always do bedtime, bath and bedtime. And I did. [SPEAKER_02] It's so funny. So many of the things you say are echoed by other guests, but they came up with in their own way, with their own words. But we'd have to be dummies at this point, either listening to this podcast or doing this podcast to not pick up on some of these. Ryan Smith, who did Qualtrics and he owns the Jazz now. When I went out and visited him for the podcast and hung out at his house, he goes, hey, let me just, he's like, I just got to do one thing. It's going to take me three minutes. And I was, that's a weird number. I've never heard anyone say you're going to miss the bathroom. He's got a task to do. That's going to take three minutes. And he basically said, I have these three minute intervals, three minute moments. I just make sure I'm fully present with my kids. And it's basically right before I drop them off at school. I'm not half here, half in my mind somewhere else. I'm fully there. Three minutes right when they get home and three minutes right before bed. He goes, this is the most important nine minutes of the day. He goes, you could be a busy guy, but you always got nine minutes. And if you could be fully present, he's not only doing nine minutes, but he just makes sure that's sacred. Yes. My kids know, my 15 year olds know, I will always answer when they call. I'll be in the middle of this podcast and they might call and I might be, guys, I got to take this. He goes, you could be a busy guy, but you always got nine minutes. And if you could be fully present, he's like, it's not like he's only doing nine minutes, but he just makes sure that's sacred. Yes. My kids know, like my 15-year-olds know, I will always answer when they call. Like I'll be in the middle of this podcast and they might call and I might be like, guys, I got to take this. So they just know they can always reach dad. And there's a priority that they get, they feel that. And some of this stuff carries over, I think, to management principles. Like my policy at Zynga was, I will always read and respond to your email to everyone in the company. We got to, I don't know, 3,500, 4,000 employees globally. And it was a lot, but I said, I'm always going to read and respond to your email. And now I try to pretty much do that on X. Anyone listening, if they go to my X at Mark Pink, I'll pretty much reply to everybody. I probably don't hit it 100 percent of the time, but I'm probably like 95 percent of the time. And so there's an availability that we can prioritize that's important in life. So yeah, I'm on that. Can I ask you a question? You know, I'm a framework guy. So when you have these frameworks, I love it. At the same time, some of my friends who are much better entrepreneurs than me don't use any of these frameworks. They just operate on pure instinct and follow their nose. Did you start Zynga by doing all this stuff, mapping out your passions and cross-referencing it with proven models or existing business models? Or did you just think about it this way now or did you create your biggest hits doing this? Like most people, this was all going on, but it wasn't written down. So I didn't just set out to show that I could make a poker app on Facebook. Like I was 41. You know, I think my friends and peers thought I had no dignity then. It was not impressive. I mean, I did it because my ego had been so beaten down at Tribe that I had to do something small that worked. I just need to do something that worked, but I wasn't going to just make like at the time, the obvious apps to make were these wall apps and these throw a drink, these pokes. I wasn't going to do that. That's what was working. Poker was not working. Games were not working on the Facebook ecosystem. I did it because I saw this ocean. I saw two oceans, two bodies of water: social networking and video games. So I was thinking, okay, if this works, it opens a little crack into mass market casual gaming. And I had this belief. One of the things I talk about in the book that I just love, and I will encourage your listeners to consider this is available to all of us all the time. Find a mature market. That's over. That's done. That's dead. That's been played out. Online dating, you know, eBay with listings or analog businesses that are not attractive. They're almost not investable. VCs won't like them. They're red oceans. They're not growth markets. Find a market like that, but it has a lot of money in it and has proven behavior in it. And that's video gaming. By the way, here's a gift. Here's an Easter egg. Take video gaming. Take video gaming in 2007. It was a $23 billion industry. It was barely growing. There was no top 10 behavior on the consumer web. And it was stupid to go into people. No, but it was not fundable. Okay. Here we are 19 years later. It's a $283 billion industry. That's not fundable. Okay. It's not growing. It's mature. You'd have a really tough time getting a VC to fund it. Perfect place to try to do something innovative because if you can find a new dimension to this that sparks people, you don't have to prove that anyone's going to do it or wants it or is going to spend money on it. It's unlimited. Right. And that was search when Google showed up. So I do love that. And I was thinking like that when I started Zynga because the year or two before I was trying to buy CNET, they were a public company. And I said, I need a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming. I need to solve distribution. Consumer was not investable because of distribution. Today, consumer is not investable because of distribution. It's a perfect parallel. The new thing then was social networking. The new thing today is AI and agents. This is like a mirror in time. I love everything Peter Thiel says, it's catnip for me. I just heard him talk and he's saying that we've lived in 50 years of stagnation, even though the economy, GDP, stock markets are up so much. When we think about how people live and how our parents, the gap between how our parents live versus their parents. We didn't see that gap again from our parents to us. And now the next generation, the kids of the nineties and the early two thousands, they don't look at their life and opportunity. You know, if our parents were in the 1960s and seventies, their parents were in the 1930s and forties. And you think about that difference. And the middle class was formed and so much. And so Peter's coming at this thing from the same problem, but the opposite side of the democratic socialists and the far left progressive Democrats. And he's saying the only solution is growth. We've got to grow the economy and grow the opportunity base for the middle class and for people in order to save capitalism and democracy. And I thought I hadn't thought about it in that way. Because I think of the last 50 years as unbelievable growth and worldwide standards of living and in technology and stock markets and all these things. But I thought that was really brilliant insight that's got me thinking. But I'd say that who I follow, I love Pirate Wires, you know, Mike Solano and there's so many insights that they've had early that were not mainstream that have changed my thinking. Do you read a lot of books? What genre of books do you like? [SPEAKER_02] I have a lot of trouble reading books. I do books on tape. I listen to a lot of podcasts while I'm walking or driving, but I get a lot. And I connect with a lot of friends around social political issues first, where we have non-mainstream views. I mean, I came out for Trump a few days before the election, that was not a mainstream or popular thing in my community to do. But I guess I pay a lot of attention to people that breakthrough in any way in consumer. That's probably something that I pay more attention to. And I think it was announced like two weeks ago or something. I invest in this company FOMO. So that's when I find the resume for me in consumer is traction. I have no idea who or why, but when I cold mailed Shane at Polymarket on Twitter when they broke through. So I would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer, because it's so broken and it's so rare. So those are good leads. And I do get a lot of macro and stock investment ideas on X. I pay a lot of attention to people that breakthrough in any way in consumer. That's probably something that I pay more attention to. And I think it was announced two weeks ago or something. I invest in this company FOMO. So when I find the resume for me in consumer is traction. I have no idea who or why, but when I cold mailed Shane at Polymarket on Twitter, when they broke through. So I would pay a lot of attention to anyone who's getting heat in consumer, because it's so broken and it's so rare. Those are good leads. And I get a lot of macro and stock investment ideas on X. Have you outperformed the index over the last 10 years, you think? Last year, I definitely did. But no, I can't say. I know I got to look at the last 10 years. I don't know if I've outperformed the index. I probably haven't this year. We've had more fun and memories. And that's what counts. You probably beat the market by 2%, maybe. I'm way behind. I think this year, I'm up 4.5%. Not including, I got a big distribution of SpaceX. I don't include that in my returns because that was a private investment. So not including SpaceX, I think I'm up 4% change. And I think the market's up probably 2 or 3 times that. So I'm not, you don't want to follow me this year. [SPEAKER_00] One thing I really like about you is you're very insightful. That's great. The second thing is I like some of the life wisdom, like the book of life practice and having an honest conversation with yourself. I think ultimately, that's actually the most useful thing that any of us could do. And then the other thing I like is that you're not one of these people who makes everyone feel bad because you're so disciplined. I like that you're not entirely disciplined and you do some stuff you shouldn't do, or you're doing things for other reasons than just what's purely utilitarian and optimal. And I like that because a lot of times people come to this podcast and I'm like, I should be doing this, we should all over ourselves. You're this strange amalgamation of investor, punk rock, consumer, good dad. This is very rare. You have this very weird. That's why I was so misunderstood by the media. When Reed Hoffman said to me, Mark, what's your narrative? What's your three bullets? And I said, I don't know. I don't have one. He said, well, either you make that up or they're going to for you. And I think you said before we started that when Zynga was big, you saw me as this villain. I think that I'm authentic and nuanced and people will meet me in person or hear me talk and they'll say, wow, I really connected with you. I really like you. [SPEAKER_01] And I'm like, thank you. But it feels like this backhanded compliment. Because they really mean, I don't hate you. What I Googled about you was so bad. When I first started dating my partner, Hillary, I said, do both of us a favor. Just don't Google me. Because you're not going to like anything you read. I was trying to understand why people hated you. Not hated you, but villain. Did you wear a lot of black? I don't know. I don't even think I found my black t-shirt yet. I know it's, I was telling you this before, but all I cared about was winning. All I cared about in winning was in the eyes of a teenage girl or a middle-aged woman who wanted to play one of our games and they weren't going to read this. They're not reading the Wall Street Journal. I hired a PR firm to keep us out of the press and when we were in the press to dampen down the story because we had figured something out with user pay and I didn't want to announce it to the world. We were just trying to win as many sprints as we could before inviting a lot of competition and venture capital. We were buying a company every month. A lot of the companies we bought, no one else was bidding on them. You bought the company that became Farmville, right? Not really. The real story is that I couldn't get anyone in Zynga to build Farmville because they thought it wasn't cool. [SPEAKER_01] They wanted to build Coasterville, Cafe World, and nobody in video gaming wanted to make a farm simulation game. There was nothing less cool. Why did you want to make it? I wasn't from video gaming. I wanted to create Pincus Valley ranch and have our vegetables served to Shapira. [SPEAKER_01] I had that fantasy and I have four sisters and I feel like I really connect with middle-aged women. I don't want Twitch, fast moving games. I want something I don't have to pay any attention to. I don't have to pay any attention to a farm. I wanted that game and I thought that would be the game that could appeal to anyone in the world because nobody needed instructions on how to play. Bing won't admit it, but he tried to convince me not to build it, even from a business standpoint. He was like, farm simulations never do well, Mark. And I finally bought this little failed flash gaming company because they had four flash engineers. And then I put them and four or five other people in an alcove outside my office and checked in with them every day. And we built Farmville together in six weeks. Did it come out the gate hot? What was day one, day two? We were going to buy this company that made Farm Town and the guy was kind of a jerk and he had the right to be a jerk. He was winning. I think he doubled the price he wanted from 40 million to 80 million and he had the right. But we were building our own version and we took out some of the things we didn't like in his game. So ours was not proven better. Newer is proven better. Less so. Our crops were better than his. Our art and math were better than his. And we had more polish, but that was it. And we took out the stranger danger part. He had ways to meet other community members. And we just thought our users didn't want that. So we turned it on. I said on a Friday, I had this tough call with him. I said, you know, I don't think this is going to work. We're not going to buy you. And our team was like, Mark, this is ready to go. And so then on Sunday, we turned on Farmville and it was one of those lightning in a bottle things. For some reason, so many things just worked, which isn't great to hear because how do you repeat that? But we turned on Farmville and I think it did 171,000 installs the first day with no marketing. It was viral. It just was viral. And then we were doing a million installs a day by the end of the first week with no marketing. We're not going to buy you. And our game, our team was like, Mark, this is ready to go. And so then on Sunday, we turned on Farmville and it was one of those lightning in a bottle things that for some reason, so many things just worked, which isn't great to hear because how do you repeat that? But we turned on Farmville and I think it did 171,000 installs the first day with no marketing. It was just viral. It was just viral. And then we were doing a million installs a day by the end of the first week with no marketing. And we passed FarmTown within three or four weeks. They were at 4 million DAUs. What was the peak, the absolute peak of Farmville? What was it doing? I think it peaked at 30 or 32 million DAUs. And at its peak, I think 15 or 20% of people on Facebook were using it or had used it. And what did it make in terms of revenue at that game? Farmville 2 came out with a lot more lessons and mechanics and made more revenues. I know Farmville 2 did over a billion in revenues. No one at that time thought a video game, definitely not a casual video game, could do over a billion in revenues. And I remember trying to explain that to Fidelity. I'm like, that's going to be a normal thing. Three million a day, that's going to be the new benchmark for a good game. But you had a question I really liked that was at the beginning of this whole thread. So I hired this PR firm because I said, I don't want to have my fur coat moment. I don't want to be on the cover of Fortune. And the fur coat moment came from that movie American Gangster. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_02] When he's in the front row at the boxing match in the fur coat, he's on the front page of the New York Times. And everything goes downhill from there. I don't want to be on the front page of anything. And the police are like, this young black guy wearing a fur coat in the front row, he must be something. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_02] What's his situation? [SPEAKER_02] I was the equivalent of that. This 41-year-old retired guy that's not supposed to be doing anything important. That's when people were writing articles saying, can you back a founder under 30 in consumer? And so I just didn't fit the narrative. I was a counterfactual and consumer wasn't supposed to be working. And so our financial performance was a trade secret. I wouldn't tell investors. I said, I'm going to tell you a price. You decide if you want to invest. Afterwards, I'll show you our financials. And if you don't like it, you can get out. But if they're not better than you think, which obviously made people even want to invest more. [SPEAKER_00] Wait, what was your first five years revenue and profit? I mean, we went public. We were forced to go public after four years. We had over a billion dollars in cash on our balance sheet when we went public. We had never spent a dollar that we raised in capital. I didn't know we wouldn't spend it. And I think the year before we went public, I think we did 450 million in free cash flow. So in year three, you're doing 450 million in free cash flow. Is that what you just said? That might have been year four. We started in mid-July of 07. So 07 wasn't a full year. We did maybe 1.5 million in 07. Of cash flow or revenue? Revenue. We were cash flowing. I probably did more than that in revenue. Because by October, November, we were making 200,000 a month in cash flow. In 08, we did 38 million in revenues. And we probably made 12 or 15 million in cash flow. But we were putting all that money into big data and then data centers. And we were raising more money because I didn't want to ever slow down. But my point is I let our story be told by our competitors and by press I didn't talk to. And I'm nuanced and Zynga was nuanced. And so I let the story go out that we're making all money from advertising, but it was really user pay. And I was fine with that. I didn't want to say no, you're wrong. And then Michael Arrington wrote for TechCrunch a whole series called Scamville. They said they must be making all their money from these really scammy ads they're showing. And they were no different than the ads on Google, but all of our money was user pay. And I didn't want to come out and say no, you idiot. We're making money from our whales. And then Arrington, who I'm friends with, I'm an investor in his fund now. He used CityVille. He played CityVille. He spent $550 in the game. And then he said, I'm so sorry. I was wrong. I get it why adults would spend money in your games now. Because remember there was no in-app purchase yet. And so all of the adults were like, there's no way adults are paying money for art. But we had a nurse in Indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month in Farmville. And this was her hobby. And her husband was spending more than that fishing and skiing and hunting. This was her hobby. And so we reframe this as we are helping to nurture a hobby somebody has. And this is a small amount to spend on a hobby. Whereas for a video game, it was a lot. Right. And I did not do myself any favors. I did not go on press tours. I didn't talk to investors. I said, I'm going to be selfish to our users and our employees. I'm not going to talk to anybody else. My kids, my players, my employees. And so everyone else told the story, and we fired a lot of people. And they were out telling our story because I had a meritocracy, a force curve. We forced you to rate 10% of your team as a low performer every quarter. And if you were two quarters in a row, you're fired without question or exception. [SPEAKER_01] That's something else. I have one other theory for that, which is you have the Nickelback problem. If you ever heard of a Veblen good, it's a good where demand goes up the more the price goes up. The Nickelback problem is basically everybody hates Nickelback and wants to shit on it. It's an easy thing to look down on. And they were out telling our story because I had a meritocracy, a force curve. We forced you to rate 10% of your team as a low performer every quarter. And if you were two quarters in a row, you're fired without question or exception. Wow. That's, you also have, I have one other theory for that, which is you have the Nickelback problem. If you ever heard of a Veblen good, it's a good where the demand goes up as the price goes up. There's the Nickelback problem: everybody hates Nickelback and wants to shit on it. It's an easy thing to look down on. You look cool for looking down on it, but yet somehow they'll sell millions of records. Nobody knows them, but somehow they're selling millions of records. It was never cool to say I love Farmville. I play Farmville and I love to play Farmville, but somehow everybody's playing, but nobody wanted to say it was cool. So you had a little bit of a problem. Well, the video game industry hated me. I was the Darth Vader. So it didn't help either. [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. They said, you're not real games. We're never going to give you an award or invite you to GDC. I was, that's cool. None of my users go to GDC. There's this article. I'm looking at old articles of you. There's one from 2011 and it says old Mark Pincus had a farm. And it's a picture of you. You look like a motorcycle guy with your boots up, overlooking the city. You had that swag that you talked about with Zuck. You had swag and you looked pretty cool and you had this I'm going to win smile on your face. And I think that's cool. But also that will rub some people the wrong way. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And there was a great tweet that I love by this guy yesterday. He has some company called tiny co or something. Yeah. Andrew Wilkinson. That's our good friend. [SPEAKER_01] All right. I loved his tweet and he referenced the courage to be disliked. [SPEAKER_00] And he said it was a huge turning point for him when he stopped trying to be liked and he stopped trying to be Warren Buffett and worry about his reputation, his resume. I'm, yes, that's my career. And that's what I advise people. I burn your resume. Don't look for respect from your peers. I say if you're truly ambitious, do not look for respect from the people around you because you will not get it if you're doing things differently than them, because they don't like that. You're supposed to stick to one mold. And if you do something different, just like you were saying, Sam, and it works, it makes them question themselves. So they don't want to see you succeed. It's, but I paid all these dues. And I don't want you to make it without paying the same dues because I'm in a job I hate. You're supposed to be in a job you hate or else I didn't have to do this. A lot of people made fun of Marc Andreessen because he had that thing where he says no one successful is introspective, which I thought was, I disagree with him. I think that's silly. That was a very introspective thing of him to say. But you are an example of someone who I think you live life fairly intentional and fairly introspective and trying to live a full good life while also you have this swag about you, but also bull in the China shop, this really cool dichotomy that I think is admirable and really exciting. Yeah. You got the California woo woo and then Zynga and your stuff was so metrics driven. You were the most metrics driven company of anyone. If I ever wanted to hire somebody who I knew would be super metrics driven on the product side, Zynga was the perfect pool to go hire from because you guys had Navy SEAL training for PMs. It was unbelievable. I still do it. I'm happy to say I do want to say it was just what you're saying, Sam, that it felt funny and bad to come out with my book pretty much the same week that Andreessen and the all in guys started saying how it's a waste of time to be introspective. And I shout out your book, man. Can you show it? Show your book and shout it out. Oh, okay. I do have one copy. Life of the speed of play. There was something on the all in where they're talking about how I forget the word. They say contemplation is a total waste of time. This is obviously an example of smart people saying dumb things. That's a really stupid thing. Or it's right for them. I don't think there is. But that's not what they do. I just saw a thing about Chamath saying talk, being retroactive, looking at his time doing SPACs. Oh yes. Yes. Well, Chamath is a lot of things, but he has no problem whatsoever contradicting himself. I heard them all talk about how AI was going to put everyone out of work. And now they're proudly saying, I think just yesterday, I saw something from them saying that's bullshit. Look, the facts don't support it. AI is not putting anyone out of work. I'm, but you guys were the ones saying it. And I love that they don't care. They'll just contradict themselves a few months later and they're not self-referential. So in that sense, there's a freedom to it. I'm not tied to what I said three months ago. I'm pounding the table now on the opposite point of view. And unless I'm right, then I'll show a clip. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah. So I do think there's a mix of all of it. I think holding yourself accountable to real things in the world is a useful tool used in the right way. And sometimes you should just go do stuff. All right. Well, we should leave it at that. You're awesome, man. I really like talking to you guys. You didn't try to earn our respect, but you certainly have it. We'll wrap up here. That's it. That's the pod. And unless I'm right, then I'll show a clip. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah. So I do think there's a mix of all of it. I think holding yourself accountable to real things in the world is a useful tool used in the right way. And sometimes you should just go do stuff. All right. Well, we should leave it at that. You're awesome, man. I really like talking to you guys. You didn't try to earn our respect, but you certainly have it. We'll wrap up here. That's it. That's the pod. You know, we were going to buy this company that made farm town and the guy was, to be honest, kind of a jerk and he had the right to be a jerk. He was, he was winning. I think he doubled the price he wanted from like 40 million to 80 million and he had the right, but we were building our own version and we took out some of the things we didn't like in his game. So ours was not proven better. New is proven better. Less. So our crops were better than his, our art and math were better than his. And we, we had more polish, but that was it. And we took out the stranger danger part. He had ways to meet other community members. And we just thought our users didn't want that. So we turned it on. I said on a Friday, I had his tough call with him. I said, you know, I don't think this is going to work. We're, we're not going to buy you. And, and our game, our team was like, Mark, this is ready to go. And so then on Sunday, we turned on Farmville and it was one of those lightning in a bottle things that, you know, for some reason, so many things was in good just worked and which isn't great to hear. Cause that, how do you repeat that? But we turned on Farmville and I think it did like 171,000 installs the first day with no marketing. It was just viral. It was just viral. It just was viral. And then we were doing like a million installs a day by the end of the first week with no marketing. And, you know, we passed farm town within like three or four weeks. They were at like 4 million DAUs. What was the peak, the absolute peak of Farmville? What was it doing? I think it peaked at like 30 or 32 million DAUs. And at its peak, I think like 15 or 20% of people on Facebook were using it or had used it. And what did it make in terms of revenue at that game? Farmville 2 came out with a lot more lessons and mechanics and made more revenues. You know, I know Farmville 2 did over a billion in revenues. No one at that time thought a video game, you know, definitely not a casual video game could do over a billion in revenues. And I remember trying to explain that to Fidelity. I'm like, that's going to be a normal thing. Like 3 million a day, baby, that's going to be the new benchmark for a good game. But you had a question I really liked that was like the beginning of this whole thread. So I hired this PR firm because I said, I don't want to have my fur coat moment. I don't want to be on the cover of Fortune. And the fur coat moment came from that movie American Gangster. Yeah. When he's in the front row at the boxing match in the fur coat, he's on the front page of the New York Times. And everything goes downhill from there. Like, I don't want to be on the front page of anything. And the police are like, this young black guy wearing a fur coat in the front row, this, he must be something. Yeah. What's his situation? I was the equivalent of that. This 41-year-old retired guy that's not supposed to be doing anything important. That's when people were writing articles saying, can you back a founder under, you know, over 30 in consumer? And so I just didn't fit the narrative. I was a counterfactual and consumer wasn't supposed to be working. And so our financial performance was a trade secret. I wouldn't tell investors. I said, you, I'm gonna tell you a price. You decide if you want to invest. Afterwards, I'll show you our financials. And if you don't like it, you can get out. But if they're not better than you think, which obviously made people even want to invest more. When you say that, you know. Wait, what was your first five years revenue and profit? I mean, we went public. We were forced to go public after four years. I mean, we had over a billion dollars in cash on our balance sheet when we went public. We had never spent a dollar that we raised in capital from, I didn't know we wouldn't spend it. But, and I think that the year before we went public, I think we did like 450 million in free cash flow. Oh my gosh. So in year three, you're doing 450 million in free cash flow. Is that what you just said? That might have been year four. Yeah. I mean, we started in mid July of 07. So 07 wasn't like a full year. You know, we did like maybe a million and a half in 07. Of cash flow or revenue? Revenue, revenue. I mean, we were cash flowing. Maybe I did more than that revenue. Because by October, November, we were making like 200,000 a month in cash flow. We, in 08, we did like 38 million in revenues. And we probably made like, I don't know, 12 or 15 million in cash flow. But, but we were, we were putting all that money. We were putting it into big data and then data centers. And then we were raising more and more money because I didn't want to ever slow down. But, but my point is I let our story be told by our competitors and by press I didn't talk to. And I'm kind of nuanced and Zynga was nuanced. And so it, I let the story go out that we're making all money from advertising, but it was really user pay. And I was fine with that. I didn't want to say, no, you're wrong. And then Michael Arrington wrote for TechCrunch, a whole series called Scamville. They said they must be making all their money from these really scammy ads they're showing. And they were no different than the ads on Google, but we also were not, all of our money was user pay. And I didn't want to come out and say, no, you idiot. We're making money from our whales. You know, and, and then Arrington, who I'm friends with, I'm an investor in his fund now. He used Cityville. He played Cityville. He spent $550 in the game. And then he said, I'm so sorry. I was wrong. I get it why adults would spend money in your games now. Because remember there was no in-op purchase yet. And so all of the adults were like, there's no way adults are paying money for art. But we had, you know, a nurse in Indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month in Farmville. And this was her hobby. And maybe her husband was spending more than that. You know, to go fishing and skiing and hunting. This was her hobby. And so we reframe this as we are helping to nurture a hobby somebody has. And this is a small amount to spend on a hobby. Whereas, you know, for a video game, it was a lot. Right. And I did not do myself any favors. I did not go on press tours. I didn't talk to investors. I said, I'm going to be selfish to our users and our employees. I'm not going to talk to anybody else ever. My kids, my players, my employees. And so my, everyone else told the story and it was, and, and we fired a lot of people. And they were out telling our story because I had a meritocracy, a force curve. We forced you to rate 10% of your team as a low performer every quarter. And if you were two quarters in a row, you're fired without question or exception. Wow. That's, you also have, I have one other theory for that, which is you have the Nickelback problem. Like if you ever heard of like a Veblen good, it's like a good where the demand goes up, the more the price goes up. There's like the Nickelback problem is basically, everybody hates Nickelback and wants to shit on it. It's like an easy, it's a easy thing to look down on. You look cool for looking down on it, but yet somehow they'll sell millions of records. Nobody knows them, but somehow they're selling millions of millions of records. Like it was never cool to say, I love Farmville. Yeah. I play, I love to play Farmville and, but, but somehow everybody's playing, but nobody wanted to say it was cool. So you had a little bit of a problem. Well, the video game, video game industry hated me. I was like the Darth Vader. So it didn't help either. Exactly. They said, you're not real games. We're never going to give you an award or invite you to GDC. I was like, that's cool. They, none of my users go to GDC. There's this article. I'm looking at old articles of you. There's one from 2011 and it says old Mark Pincus had a farm. And it's a picture of you. You look like a motorcycle, a guy like with your boots up, like overlooking the city. Like you're, you had, you had that swag that you talked about with Zuck. I mean, you had swag and you looked pretty cool and you kind of had like a you I'm going to win, like smile on your face. And I think that's kind of cool. But also that will be, that will rub some people the wrong way. Yeah. And there was a great tweet that I love by this guy yesterday. He has some company called like tiny co or something. Yeah. Andrew Wilkinson. That's our, that's our good friend. All right. I loved his tweet and he referenced the courage to be disliked. And he said, he said it was a huge turning point for him when he stopped trying to be liked and he stopped trying to be like Warren Buffett and worry about his reputation, basically his resume. I'm like, yes, that's, that's my career. And that's what I advise people. I'm like, burn your resume. Don't look for respect from your peers. I say, if you're truly ambitious, do not look for respect from the people around you because you will not get it if you're doing things differently than them, because they don't like that. I mean, you're supposed to like, stick to this one mold. And, and if you do something different, just like you were saying, Sam, and it works, it makes them question themselves. So they don't, they kind of don't want to see you succeed. Do it. It's like, it's like, but I paid all these dues. And I don't want you to make it without paying the same dues because I'm in a job I hate. You're supposed to be in a job you hate or else I didn't have to do this. A lot of people made fun of Marc Andreessen because he had that thing where he says, like, no one successful is introspective, which I thought was, I disagree with him. I think that's kind of silly. That was a very introspective thing of him to say. But you are, you are an example of someone who, uh, I think you live life fairly intentional and fairly introspective and trying to like live like a full good life while also you have this like swag about you, but also bull in the China shop, like this, like really cool dichotomy that I think is like very admirable and really exciting. Yeah. You got like the California woo woo and then Zynga and your stuff is so, was so metrics driven. You were like the most metrics driven company of anyone. If I ever wanted to hire somebody who I knew would be like super metrics driven on the product side, Zynga was the perfect pool to go hire from because you guys had like a Navy SEAL training for, for PMs. It was unbelievable. I still do it. I'm happy to say I do want to say it was just what you're saying, Sam, that it felt a little like funny and bad to come out with my book, like pretty much the same week that Andreessen and the all in guys, they all started saying how it's a waste of time to be introspective. And I shout out your book, man. Can you show it? Show your, show your book and shout it out. Oh, okay. I do have one copy, uh, life of the speed of life of the speed of play. There was something on the all in where they're talking about how I forget the word. They, they say contemplation is, is a total rumination waste of time. This is obviously an example of smart people saying dumb things. That's just a really stupid thing. Or it's right for them. I mean, it's, I don't think there is. But that's not what they do. I just saw a thing about Chamath saying talk, being retroactive, looking at his time doing SPACs. Oh yes. Yes. Well, Chamath is, is a lot of things, but he has no problem whatsoever contradicting himself. I mean, I heard them all talk about how AI was going to put everyone out of work. And now they're proudly saying like, I think just yesterday, I saw something from them saying that's bullshit. Look, the facts don't support it. AI is not putting anyone out of work. I'm like, but you guys were the ones saying it. And I kind of love that they don't care. They'll just contradict themselves, you know, a few months later and they don't, they're not self-referential. So in that sense, there's a freedom to it. I'm not tied to what I said three months ago. I'm, I'm pounding the table now on the opposite point of view. And unless I'm right, then I'll show a clip. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I, I, I do think there's a mix of all of it. I think holding yourself accountable to real things in the world is useful tool used in the right way. Um, and sometimes you should just go do stuff. All right. Well, we should leave it at that. You're awesome, man. I really like talking to you guys. You didn't try to earn our respect, but you certainly have it. We'll wrap up here. That's it. That's the pod. namenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamenamename